NSDS 2008 - Conference Speakers

Peter Ackerley, England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB)

As the Head of Development, Peter’s job is to develop cricket across the country from the playground to the test arena. Peter and his team at the ECB work to improve not only the numbers of people playing the game at all levels, but also the quality of provision at the country’s 7,000 cricket teams.

The ECB recently announced a 27% increase in participation in club and school cricket in 2006/07.

Liz Behnke, Syzygy Leisure

With more than twenty years working in the leisure industry, Liz possesses a wide range of skills in the fields of inward investment, as an applicant, assessor and advisor. She has written key strategies for EFDS, WSSF and British Blind Sport. She is currently working for Sporting Equals on a project looking at Faith Groups and New and Emerging Communities. Liz has also written the Race Equality training module for the Football Association.

Mike Behnke, Syzygy Leisure Within the sport and leisure industry

Mike has held a variety of roles in the public and voluntary sectors. He has a wide-ranging background which has seen him develop and successfully implement policies and strategies for sport at local, regional and national levels. As a fluent Polish Speaker, he has excellent links to the Polish community in England, as well as having an understanding of other Slavic languages.

Mark Botterill

Helen Brooking, Youth Sport Trust

Helen has been working for the Trust since February 2007. She is a Development Manager with the responsibility of a number of School Sport Partnerships for the Yorkshire East Midlands area. Nationally she is involved in all the Further education sport co-ordinator inductions that are currently being rolled out. Her background has always been in sport, she is a qualified PE teacher and before joining Youth Sport Trust worked in North East Lincolnshire as a School Sport Co-ordinator and Assistant Partnership Development Manager.

Rt. Hon Richard Caborn, MP

Richard Caborn MP has been the Labour Member of Parliament for Sheffield Central since June 1983. Having joined the ‘front bench’ in 1988, he has enjoyed a number of high profile political roles within the Labour Party, including Spokesman on Trade and Industry, Regional Affairs and the Chairman of the Trade and Industry Select Committee.

Following Labour’s decisive victory at the 1997 General Election, he entered the government of Tony Blair as the Minister of State at the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions, in which role he was closely involved in establishing the English Regional Development Agencies. In 2001 he was appointed Sports Minister and amongst his many successes brought about considerable change in a number of governing bodies, supporting the drive for independent chairman in such organisations.

Having stepped down as Minister for Sport in 2007, Rt. Hon Richard Caborn MP has been appointed as Gordon Brown’s ambassador for a possible 2018 World Cup bid.

Phil Collier, runningsports

Phil Collier is currently Director of Business Development for runningsports. He has significant experience in the world of sport, previously as Head of Sport and Recreation at SkillsActive, Head of Education and Training at Sport England and before that as National Development Officer for the England Lacrosse Union.

Mark Cullum, NEL Council

Mark's main role revolves around managing the work of the Sports Development Unit. In addition to this he leads on strategic projects aimed at improving access and opportunities for local people to become involved in sport and active recreation.

Adrian Christy, Badminton England

Adrian Christy is the Chief Executive of Badminton England. He was appointed in September 2006 and brings a wealth of sports management / development experience to the position with previous roles including working for the Millwall Football Academy, National Coaching Foundation, The LTA and England Squash. Adrian has set his ten year vision for Badminton England in the “Decade of Delivery” to grow all aspects of the game - participation, coaching and competition with the ultimate ambition to be regarded as the best nation by 2016.

Liz Davidson, Woman's Sport and Fitness Foundation

Liz has been with the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation for 2 years during this time she has worked extensively with National Governing Bodies on providing advice and expertise on the Equality Standard for Sport and interventions to promote women’s participation in sport.

Roger Davis, Youth Sport Trust

Roger joined the Youth Sport Trust in 1996 and has held a variety of roles including Development officer and Implementations Manger working with the TOPS programmes. Roger managed the YST’s development team for 3 years and subsequently worked on innovatory projects with Coca Cola and bSKYb.

More recently Roger has taken a lead role in the development of the National Competition Framework for young people, with a wide range of NGBs and National Schools Associations as part of the PESSYP strategy.

Andrew Gair, Sports Coach UK

With 24 years coaching experience in Rugby Union, Andy has been actively involved in coach education, coach management and coach development within sport at a variety of levels and within a variety of levels. Having worked widely across the sports industry, in both public and private sectors, he is now Head of Coaching Workforce Development for sports coach UK, the lead development agency for the sports coaching system within the UK.

David Gent, Sport England Yorkshire

David Gent was born in Toronto Canada and moved to the UK aged 8 years. He attended Carnegie College Leeds and was the youngest chair of an Olympic governing body of sport (BCU) at age 28 years. David has been Regional Director for Sport England in Yorkshire for 5 years and is a current board members of the Culture and Sport Partnership for Sheffield. His early career was in local government in the field of High Performance and Community Sport.

Peter Gordon

Steve Grainger, MBE, Youth Sport Trust

Steve Grainger is Chief Executive of the Youth Sport Trust. He was part of the team that initially established the organisation in 1995 and prior to this worked in local government and at the National Coaching Foundation (now Sportscoach UK). Steve has been central to the design and development of the national PE and School Sport strategy, was responsible for the creation of the first UK School Games in 2006 and is heavily involved in the modernisation programme of junior competitive sport. He sits on a number of government groups and boards and has worked extensively with several overseas governments supporting their work in sport and education.

Stuart Guise, Sports Coach UK

Stuart has worked for sports coach UK for 8 years and he is currently a Coaching System Manager. His role is to support a number of sports in the implementation of the UK Coaching Framework. Prior to his current role he was the Strand Leader for Frontline Coaching, a Strategic Action Area of the UK Coaching Framework. His career began as a Sports Development Officer for Cherwell District Council, where he was for three and a half years. He plays and coachs Hockey for Stratford Upon Avon Hockey Club.

Sue Hook, SkillsActive

Sue Hook leads on the development of the Diploma in Sport and Active Leisure here at SkillActive. She is also leads on the National Occupational Standards for Spectator Safety and is the Technical unit link to Playwork and the Playwork unit within SkillsActive.

Clare Howard, Prospects 4 Sport

Clare is an experienced Project Manager, consultant, trainer and facilitator with over 17 years’ experience in sport and recreation working in both the public and private sectors. Clare now runs Prospects4Sport, a training and facilitation company, and is a consultant for the industry. She has previously worked for Reading Borough Council, Sport England, the London Borough of Redbridge and PMP.

Simon Kirkland, Sport Structures

Simon has a broad background and experience in sport having been a Chief Executive of England Basketball and working for Birmingham City Council as a Sport Development Officer.He left the English Basketball Association in the summer of 2002 to initiate his own business, leading project management teams that have delivered on a broad range of sport related areas in particular governance and leadership. Simon has supported the development of strategies for sport in Local authorities, County Sport Partnerships and National Governing Bodies.

Dave Levine, Sport Coach UK

David is the Learning and Development Manager at sports coach UK with responsibility for Training and ‘upskilling’ our current workforce in order to meet the requirements of the UK Coaching Framework, and thus working towards meeting the organisations mission of creating a world leading coaching system by 2016.

Geoff Maltby, Leicester-Shire and Rutland Sport

Geoff has over 6 years experience in the sports development field. He is currently based at Loughborough University working as a Senior Competition Manager for Leicester-Shire and Rutland Sport since September 2007. This role is part of the National roll-out of competition managers within School Sport Partnerships co-ordinated by the Youth Sport Trust, funded through the Government’s new PE and Sport Strategy for Young People (PESSYP).

Peter Mann, ISPAL

Peter is Executive Chairman of PMP and was appointed ISPAL Chairman in February 2007. He has worked in the sport and leisure sector for over 30 years in local government, leisure facility development and management consultancy. Peter is a recognised expert in event legacy planning and implementation and is a strong advocate of raising professional standards within the industry.

Steve Mitchell, SkillsActive

Steve has been working for SkillsActive since 2004. He currently has a regional strategic role which is part funded by the LDA and Sport England. During the last 4 years he has worked as a national lead across a range of initiatives which include apprenticeships, national occupational standards, sector qualifications strategy, National Skills Academy and most recently the Coaching Bursary in London. Steve has worked closely with NGBs of sport and a range of delivery partners to make the programme mainstream and sustainable the success of the programme was demonstrated in Beijing when Rebecca Addlington won 2 Gold Medals as an AASE athlete.

Steve Nelson, University of West England

Steve Nelson was a professional Basketball player for 15 years, achieving 18 senior international caps, captaining the GB World Student Games Team, and being a part of numerous teams who gained success at national level (cup, league, play-offs). Towards the latter part of his playing career, Steve was appointed as Sport Development Officer for Worthing Borough Council. In 1998 he was appointed as National Development Manager for the English Basketball Association, a post he left in 2002 to become county sports partnership manager for Sussex. In 2005, Steve took on the role of Director for the West of England Sports Partnership (covering Bath & NE Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire).

Margret Nolan, runningsports

Margaret Nolan joined the runningsports team as their Partnership Development Manager in November 2007. She previously worked for British Cycling as the National Manager for Club Development and Young People Programmes. Outside of work she is a keen sports player, active volunteer and the representative for the local Sport and Physical Activity Alliance (SPAA).

Rachel O'Bryan, Youth Sport Trust

Rachel has been working with the YST since January 2007. Her role primarily centres on the developments of the national competition framework with particular reference to the competition managers and the national governing bodies and school sport associations of sport.

Florence Orban, SkillsActive

Florence joined SkillsActive as Head of Business Development in June 2005 before taking on the role of Project Director and subsequently interim CEO for the National Skills Academy. Florence has been responsible for the overall delivery of the project and submission of the business plan to the Learning and Skills Council.

Neil Raine, English Table Tennis Association

24 year old Neil hails from Scarborough, in North Yorkshire. He is currently a student at Hull University's Scarborough Campus, studying Sport Management. He works with Youth Sport Trust and English Table Tennis Association as a Young Official Development Officer.

Richard Saunders, Greater Sport

Richard joined Greatersport as chief executive in 1999, when the present company was formed by the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities and Sport England. Since then the network and partnership has grown to be the largest single sport and activity network in the country.

Bansari Somani, SkillsActive

Bansari Somani has several years of experience working in the education sector. Since joining SkillsActive she has led on developing community development units within the national occupational standards for Sports Development. Over the past year she has been delivering a Skills for Business Network project to build an on-line toolkit on equality and diversity to support Sector Skills Councils and employers to improve their work in this area.

Kat Southwell

Kat Southwell is a full time volunteer as a Young Officials Development Officer (YODO) for Disability Sport. Her role involves developing Officials pathway for young people in Boccia as well as supporting the Equity agenda of the young official's project.

Mark Sutcliffe, Strategic Leisure

Mark is one of the UK’s most experienced leisure consultants. He moved into consultancy in 1992 after a ten year career in leisure management, during which he held a number of senior positions within local government including head of leisure services within a large urban authority. He has worked on over 500 leisure consultancy projects with a particular focus upon strategic planning, management and operation, partnership negotiation and events. Under his stewardship Strategic Leisure has grown into one of the largest specialist leisure consultancy practices.

Sue Sutton

Sue joined ISPAL as Chief Executive in August 2007 from Badminton England where she had been the National Development Director since 2004. Prior to that, she worked for England Hockey for six years in two development roles.

Sue trained originally as a teacher and worked in a number of teaching and management roles during her eighteen years in education. Sue also holds a number of coaching and umpiring qualifications.

Alan Sykes, League Football Education

Alan is the Chief Executive of League Football Education (LFE). The organisation was formed through a partnership between The Football League and The Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), has charitable status. The primary objective of LFE is to promote and enhance educational and vocational training for apprentice footballers aged 16 to 18, who are attached to professional football clubs.

John Thorpe, SkillsActive

His current role focuses on the development of industry training frameworks, National Occupational Standards and the formulation of Scottish and National Vocational Qualifications as well as on the National Qualifications Framework.

Sue Tibballs, Woman's Sport and Fitness Foundation

Sue Tibballs joined the Women’s Sport and Fitness and Foundation (WSFF) as Chief Executive almost 2 years ago, during which time she has re-branded the organisation, enlarging its scope from sport alone, to encompass the highly contemporary issues of fitness and exercise and the cultural portrayal of women in society.

Nik Trivedi, Sporting Equals

Nik Trivedi joined the Sporting Equals team in July 2007. He is currently the Policy and Communications Manager. Sporting Equals aims to create an environment in which ethnic minorities can influence and participate in all aspects of sport, where the governors and providers of sport recognise and value a fully integrated and inclusive society and where cultural diversity is recognised and celebrated.

Phil Veasey, Sport England

Phil Veasey joined Sport England in 2003 as Head of Sports Development and is now Head of the Children and Young People’s Unit. Phil spent 16 years at the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) where his legacy was the creation and implementation of the National Mini Tennis Programme.

Mihir Warty, Sport England

Mihir is the Director of Policy and Performance at Sport England with responsibility for strategy development, business planning, performance reporting and research monitoring and evaluation. He has held his current position since August 2006 and previously spent five years with the BBC's strategy team.

George Wood, BADMINTON England

George worked as BADMINTON England’s Coaching Manager leading the organisation to achieve UKcc L1 and L2. After seven years, he moved to Sport England where he Senior Client Manager within the National Sport Team, but was enticed back to BADMINTON England where he took over his role as Head of Development in September 2007.

Steve Woolland, SkillsActive

Steve Woolland is the sector manager for Sport and has a background in coaching both in the UK and abroad, He has worked in development roles for the Lawn Tennis Association and England Squash. A former County tennis player, Steve also represents Middlesex Lawn Tennis Association as a volunteer County Child Protection Officer and is a safeguarding and protecting children tutor.